The concept of a virtual machine (VM) has been used in computing for decades. Mainframe computers throughout computing history have taken advantage of their computing power by using multiple instances of an operating system on the same computer. Virtual machines are highly desirable due to their ability to isolate specific applications, tasks, or users. For example, an individual wanting to manage their personal finances might use a virtual machine specifically equipped with personal accounting software and a variety of sensitive personal finance data. Virtual machines advantageously can be backed up to prevent data loss due to a computer failure and may prevent others from seeing or exploiting sensitive data.
Driving this functionality into personal computers and single-processor servers was difficult early on due to the large amount of computing system resources (e.g., processor speed, memory, and input/output) required to run multiple operating systems on the same computer. As computing power for small systems has grown, and more sophisticated processor architectures (such as 64-bit processors and multi-core processors) have increased throughput and memory address space, the viability, adoption, and proliferation of virtual machines has grown into the main stream consumer market.
Conventional solutions provided by, for example, VMware®, Microsoft®, and Xen®, generally include a basic user interface. For example, Xen develops an open source Linux player and VMware develops Windows-based and Linux-based virtualization software for personal and server computers. VMware refers to virtual machines as “virtual appliances.” VMware has a patented virtual machine monitor and method for operating a virtual machine (U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,397,242 and 6,496,847, respectively), as well as several additional patents that describe specific methods by which virtual machine actions or behavior are accomplished or managed (U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,704,925, 6,711,672, 6,725,289, 6,735,601, 6,785,886, 6,789,156 and 6,795,966). U.S. Pat. No. 6,961,941 describes how resources are managed by name. The contents of the aforementioned patents are hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties.
Microsoft increased their virtualization competency through the acquisition of a company called Connectix, whose release of Virtual PC for Mac allowed Apple® users to run Microsoft Windows and its associated applications on a virtual machine. Microsoft has patents protecting various aspects of their virtual machine technology including storage technology (e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,968,350). The contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Virtual machine use has evolved from very sophisticated computing solutions available mostly to large enterprises, government, and academic institutions down to the mid-market and home users. Because a virtual machine needs all of the same things a physical computer needs (i.e., processor, memory, and input via a keyboard and mouse), the way in which virtual machines are created and configured is quite technical and involved.
Problems, however, exist with deploying virtual machines. Virtual machines are typically stored as a set of files. These files are generally quite large, often 1 giga-byte (GB) and can be more than 100's of GB. These files remain large, even when compressed. While the portability of virtual machines (or the ability of a virtual machine to be easily moved and run from one physical host computer to another) is very attractive, the time to move and load the files can take several hours and require some human monitoring and involvement.
Virtual machines also are technically complex to create and use. Effectively using them often requires more technical knowledge and time than is possessed by the average business professional (information worker) who daily uses computers. Even many technically trained information technology professionals have problems with creating and using virtual machines.